Working Realtek SoC RTL8196E 97D 97F in last master

[gaspare]

@olliver

you are saying that the bootloader expects some lzma encoded payload, regardless whether it is linux, or something else. Hence, our image format must always be lzma encoded, correct?

Correct... The Realtek bootloader looks for a specific format (CVIMG) in the flash... The CVIMG divide the flash in kernel and rootfs... And the kernel signature is actually the LZMA signature....

@olliver

I'll try to hack together some assembly to call these instructions (once i find the post :p) but if you've already done that, that would help. Regardlesss, I do still see we need patches on the toolchains and target support for the lexra CPU, as even with the missing instructions, it's not quite mips is it?

The Lexra misses 4 instructions in MIPS, but the rest is the same... There is a way to simulate those instructions in kernel, so you do not need to change the toolchains... We can use MIPS 1 instruction set in gcc (MIPS for R3000). Lexra is fully compatible with MIPS 1 without unaligned instructions, but it runs slowly as those instructions need to be emulated ...
A change in the toolchain is the better way if we want performance, as we can optimize the code for the instructions of MIPS 2 in Lexra and also use some new instructions that only Lexra have (cool DSP features ) ...

Target support for Lexra is always needed in kernel, as the memory management is different from other architectures (that is normal even for full MIPS architectures)...